Imposter Syndrome: Stories about not feeling good enough

The Story Collider

Almost everyone has at one time or another felt inadequate despite their achievements. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share their struggles with feelings of self-doubt, insecurity and the fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Part 1: Sarah Demers has this nagging feeling she’s not a real physicist.

Part 2: After dropping out of college, Kevin Smiley can’t seem to shake his feelings of inadequacy.

Sarah Demers is a particle physicist and professor at Yale University. She studies the Higgs boson and looks for physics beyond the current "standard model" using CERN's Large Hadron Collider. She's also an interdisciplinary enthusiast, having co-written the book "Physics and Dance" with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, and regularly teaching a "Physics and Music" course at Yale. When she isn't physics'ing she can be found hiking with her kids, foraging for mushrooms, brewing beer, or blissfully watching certifiably terrible science fiction with her husband.

Kevin Smiley is a US Army veteran and senior mechanical engineering undergraduate with a minor in applied mathematics and an interest in thermal-fluid science.

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